1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing apparatus, an image processing method, and a storage medium, and more particularly to an image processing apparatus configured to receive digital image data from an external apparatus and perform various types of processing on the received digital image data.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, personal computers and image processing apparatuses each provided with a large-capacity memory have been in wide spread use. This technological advance makes it possible to use large image data files, and image data files per se have come to be larger in volume, higher in resolution, and higher-value-added.
In such an environment, more and more cases occur where a large file having multiple pages including numerous image pages is used. As a multi-page image file format, there may be mentioned the TIFF file format. FIG. 1 is a diagram of an example of a multi-page file.
Referring to FIG. 1, the multi-page file 10 has a file header 10-1 in the leading part thereof, and page headers 11-1, 12-1, and 13-1 in the leading parts of respective page data portions 11, 12, and 13. The thus structured multi-page file 10 is configured to make it possible to access the page data portions 11, 12, and 13 by sequentially referring to the page headers 11-1, 12-1, and 13-1.
There has been proposed a technique of adding attribute information as an added value to each of the page data portions of a large image data file structured as above, to thereby improve the user friendliness of the page data by the attribute information (see Japanese Patent Laid-Open Publication No. 2001-43239). More specifically, Japanese Patent Laid-Open Publication No. 2001-43239 discloses a technique of achieving high-speed access to necessary image data by adding feature information to each piece of page data (hereinafter also referred to as “image data”) within a data file.
However, in the case of processing a multi-page file, such as a TIFF file, using a conventional image processing apparatus, all image data portions are sequentially searched for from a leading one, thereby processing all the image data portions. This excessively increases the amount of processing, and hence the apparatus is sometimes forced to perform useless processing. Further, when processing is impossible due to destruction of part of data in a multi-page file, an excessively large image size or the lie, processing of the multi-page file is stopped at the time, so that the processing is terminated in error. Thus, it is by no means a rare case that the user has to terminate processing without achieving a desired object.
This also applies to processing of a multi-page file having attribution information added to each page so as to achieve quick processing, and therefore it is desired to develop a technique which makes it possible to eliminate a waste or an inconvenience caused by canceling processing of all the pages due to processing failure occurring on one of pages of the file.